You will either have what you’re aiming for today or not, but the anxiety you’re currently feeling will subside to the point of irrelevancy.

The stress we invent or foster is not real: It’s literally imagined. Yes, there are and will always be external forces that complicate our day-to-day; but they’re rarely of the life-threatening variety anymore. Now we manufacture mental monsters to keep ourselves from achieving. In this part of the world, we’ve eliminated most of our predators, only to replace them with the beast we’re powerless against: Self Doubt.

Nobody can hold you back in life as much as your own fear that you’ll fail. I’ll save you some time: you will fail. Sometimes spectacularly.

But aggregate enough failures, and sooner or later, you’ve got so much experience that you cannot fail. Then, life becomes a series of seemingly easy breaks. The formula for success is repeated failure. So head into your meeting knowing that, win or lose, you’ve already succeeded today.

There are only 100 steps on the road to success, but the first 99 are fraught with failure. Get by them, however, and you get to the top.